by Mark Hart

Created on: October 27, 2009   Last Updated: November 01, 2009

Truth is a rational concept, an idea in one's head, not a thing. When people claim they possess the truth, or insist that if you read a certain book or go to a particular location you will find the truth, they are not talking about finding an object or set of objects. Rather they are suggesting that a particular book or place will orient you in your thinking so that you might come to understand (and possibly believe!) as they do. So, (to adopt W ittgenstein's pain analogy) truth is not a something...but its not a nothing, either. In other words, you can ask your doctor to dig a thorn out of your palm, but you cannot meaningfully add, "And while you're at it, could you also dig out the pain?" Pain and thorns are ontologically different kinds of realities.

While concepts are not things, they are certainly derived from the world of actual things or objects. One does not sit in the idea of a chair; one sits in an actual chair. In this sense truth does have referential value or objectivity. Disagreements over "truth" may be disagreements about the content or composition of the objective world (and therefore might be adjudicated by agreed upon methods of observation and measurement). But they may also reflect disagreements over how we actually do or should go about judging and deciding, in relation to our own moral, aesthetic, or pragmatic standards of judgment. Thus, the notion of "truth" sometimes stands proxy for "This is what I believe..." or "This is how I think the world really works." For this reason, value-judgments carry the discussion of absolute truth beyond mere physicality and into the realm of subjective judgment or belief. So then, although the concept of truth is derived from objective experience, it also depends on subjective judgments we integrate into our picture of world.

Can subjective judgments ever be said to be absolute or objectively true? Of course, and we see this all the time. People earnestly believe in justice, equality, humility, freedom, etc., and they typically relate the meaning or sense of these value-laden terms to real living conditions or how objects are related in the actual world. But here we must be careful, for if we think of absolute truth as something that can be objectively verified or pointed to just like other physical objects, we will have been misled by our language. Not every subjective truth need be relegated to mere opinion just as not every absolute truth need be significant. For example, if I insist it is absolutely

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